Pete Docter’s 1 min. pitch for the original Monsters, Inc.

I’m a sucker for a great story. Enough that I want to build my whole career on storytelling, in fact. So when someone inherently great at it, like speakers on The Moth, This American Life, or say, Oscar-winning screenwriter and Pixar feature director Pete Docter (Monsters, Inc., Up) throws one our way, I get pretty engrossed and excited about it.

On a new episode of Jeff Goldsmith’s Creative Screenwriting Magazine Podcast (a show great for so many reasons that I won’t get into here), Pete Docter and the eternally entertaining Bob Peterson sat down to talk about Up and their own histories for an altogether too-short 1 hour, 12 minute podcast.

About 22 minutes in, while talking about how much films change over the course of their development, Jeff pressed Pete for what the story of Monsters, Inc. originally was. While I love Monsters, Inc. in a big way, the film he described sounded pretty amazing, and one I’d still love to see in the future. I highly recommend listening to the minute-long audio file in this post, but, if you can’t access it for whatever reason, I’ve transcribed it here below. And make sure to check out and subscribe to the free Creative Screenwriting Magazine Podcast so you don’t miss an episode of insights, stories, and fantastic interviews with screenwriters from every genre. Also in this episode is Pete + Bob confirming that they’re currently developing their next film together.

“Well, my idea was that what it was about was about a 30 year old man who is like an accountant or something, he hates his job, and one day he gets a book with some drawings in it that he did when he was a kid from his mom, and he doesn’t think anything of it and he puts it on the shelf and that night, monsters show up. And nobody else can see them. He thinks he’s starting to go crazy, they follow him to his job, and on his dates, and all this— and it turns out these monsters are fears that he never dealt with as a kid. And each one of them represents a different kind of fear. As he conquers those fears, the guys who he slowly becomes kind of friends with— they disappear as he conquers those fears. It’s this bittersweet kinda ending where they go away, and so not much of that stayed

[…]

it sounds better as a pitch than it did at the time— anyway. “

I’m down.

Other recent Pixar-related stuff on my blog: Pixar University and Wall-E/Buy’n’Large easter eggs in the Toy Story 3 trailer!